The Weird Picture

by John R. Carling

"Damn you! you shall not escape!" he cried fiercely. "I'll have your life, though I die the next moment for it!"

With the dagger gleaming aloft, he darted on me. Measuring him with my eye, I swung the chair round, and tried to bring it down on his head, but he eluded the blow by springing deftly to one side.

The robe of tragedy is often sewn with the threads of comedy. The chair intended for the artist lighted instead on his unfinished picture, and went sheer through the canvas, overturning the easel, and inflicting more damage to the painted Colosseum in two seconds than old Time has been able to inflict on the solid original in well-nigh two millenniums.

"My picture! Oh, my picture!" cried the artist. "You have destroyed it!"

Petrified with dismay, he gazed on the ruins of his work of art, oblivious for the moment of everything else. Taking advantage of his surprise, I sprang forward, and seized him by the throat with such force and energy that he toppled backwards, and measured his length on the floor of the cell. I fell with him.

"That's it! Bravo! Hold him down!" cried a voice, which I recognised as the Baronet's. "We'll be with you in an instant."

Sir Hugh, my uncle, and some others were standing on the window-ledge, striving to effect an entrance by forcing asunder the slender cross-bars of the casement.

The artist lay extended on the floor of the cell. My knee was on his chest, and with one hand I grasped him by the throat, and with the other pinioned to the floor his hand that held the dagger. I tried to keep him in this position till aid should come, but with a strength almost superhuman he rose to his feet, dragging me with him, and, grappling with each other, we swayed backwards and forwards in the moonlit cell.

"I always hated you," he gasped. "But for you I might have won the love of Daphne. You shall not escape me!"

He made frantic efforts to reach me with the dagger, but I clung heavily to the arm that held it, impeding his power of action. At length with a sudden effort of strength he flung me off, but as he did so the cross-bars of the casement gave way, and three human bodies were projected through it in a most ungraceful fashion, and fell on all-fours to the floor.